


The Lowest Point

by Mithen



Category: DCU - Comicverse
Genre: Grief, M/M, Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-10
Updated: 2010-11-10
Packaged: 2017-10-14 17:24:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/151677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mithen/pseuds/Mithen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Supergirl confronts a sinister figure stalking her cousin across the Mohave desert.  A couple of reunions follow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lowest Point

The small, bright figure trudged across the barren landscape, step by slow step, all alone. He had left the road behind.

From high above, Kara Zor-El watched her cousin walking through Death Valley, a long trail of footprints in his wake. All around him stretched the pure white salt plains of Badwater Basin, cracked and crazed, simmering in the heat: a desolate and empty world.

Kal-El’s steps slowed and stopped, and for a moment he stood still. Not looking around at the eerie bleak beauty, just standing. Kara knew exactly where her cousin was, where his long walk from Metropolis had taken him.

He stood precisely at the lowest point in America.

Kara swallowed hard, and the desert below shimmered like a heat haze. She blinked, looking away--and that’s when she saw it.

There was a strange _absence_ against a distant bluff on the far side of the salt plain, a space that...didn’t belong, somehow. Her eyes slid off of it, her brain insisted it wasn’t important.

She told her brain to stop it and focused harder, narrowing her eyes, and the space resolved into a human shape, swathed in black. It had crystal-red lens over its eyes, with a third in the center of its forehead.

And it was stalking Kal.

With the bleak desert landscape it would have looked almost comical--a black-clad coyote lying in wait for a bright roadrunner--if it hadn’t been a person with unknown tech preparing to ambush her cousin. Kara felt her hands clench, felt her eyes kindle fury, and she swooped down from the skies like an avenging angel.

The stalker threw himself to the side as she closed in, but she managed to grab him by one arm, hoisting him into the air without slowing down. They were above Arizona before the figure could respond a second later, twisting in her grasp. A red beam lanced out of his third “eye” with enough heat to startle her and enough punch to take her breath away. The stalker kicked out of her grip and dropped toward the ground below.

She snatched him back out of the air, shaking him. “How dare you,” she snarled. “How _dare_ you! Leave my cousin alone, you damn jackal, you...you _khraght_ , you--” She stopped.

The figure was laughing, a long, low chuckle, even while being buffeted in her grip.

A laugh she recognized.

She almost dropped him again.

“Kara,” said Bruce Wayne’s voice, “I didn’t come all this way to get shaken to death by an angry Kryptonian, I hope.

“Or hugged to death, either,” he added after a moment.

“Rao, is it really you? What are you doing here?”

“It’s really me.” He lifted the mask--it was of some strange substance that seemed part rubber and part silk--and let her see his lopsided smile. “As for what I’m doing here...well, I should think it would be obvious.”

Kara narrowed her eyes. “Spying on my cousin?”

“Like you were?”

“I wasn’t _spying_ , I was...checking.”

“Well then,” he said as if that explained everything.

“So you’re here to talk to him? Does he know you’re back?”

“We...saw each other briefly. At the end of time.” The stormy blue eyes shifted toward shadow for a moment. “And I’m sure Diana let him know I’m back. But I haven’t talked to him yet.”

“He hasn’t talked to you?” That alone startled Kara almost as much as her cousin’s long and solitary walk. “But you’re going to talk to him now, right?” The look of discomfort on Bruce’s face made her frown and shake him slightly. “You _are_ here to talk to him, right? You’re not planning on just skulking around and watching him?”

Bruce glanced north, even though Kal was hundreds of miles away. “If he wanted to talk to me, he could have found me.” Was that a touch of sullenness turning the edge of his voice to smoke? “I assume he wants to be alone.”

“You assume--” Kara shook her head slowly. “You just don’t know what to say to him, do you? You’re afraid you won’t be able to connect. Afraid you won’t--” She broke off at the look in Bruce’s eyes.

“Just put me down, Kara,” he said, his flat tone that of her teacher and mentor, a voice that assumed obedience. Any uncertainty or wistfulness she heard could be entirely her own imagination.

So she put him down.

 **: : :**

 _This is why I don’t like dealing with Kryptonians_ , Bruce had time to think as the blazing white salt flats closed in on him fast and hard, _They always think they know what you really--_

The ground slammed up against his back with just enough _whumph_ to knock the wind out of him. Salt and sand geysered in the air, and he closed his eyes against the shower of grit. A part of his mind took interested note of the fact that Supergirl had assessed and disabled his suit’s flight capacity so quickly, as well as the fact that she had enough fine control of her powers to hurl him into the ground hard enough to stun but not hard enough to really _hurt_.

He would have to make an entry about that later. Her temper did seem on the short side, although that could easily be attributed to her recent--

 _Wayne, could you just have an interaction with someone for ten minutes without evaluating them?_ he thought wearily. Apparently not.

Then a shadow fell across him and he opened his eyes.

Superman stood between him and the sun, looking down, his face in shadow. Bruce realized belatedly that his mask was still off. So much for subterfuge and cunning.

“Hello,” he said when he eventually got his breath back and could say two syllables without wheezing.

“Hello,” said Superman.

Bruce waited for him to extend a helping hand, but Superman was still just staring down at him. Eventually the lack of response became too awkward to bear, and Bruce scrambled to his feet, resisting the temptation to brush dust off his suit and hair.

Superman was still looking at him, not smiling, just looking. Batman had seen that flat gaze in the eyes of hostages who had waited too long, seen too much.

Long moments passed under the blistering Mojave sun, and Superman stood still: not reaching out, not touching. _You’re afraid you won’t be able to connect,_ Kara’s voice murmured in his memory, brushing up against old scars, and Bruce realized he didn’t have the faintest idea what to do now. Clark was the one who always bridged the gap, Clark was the one--

Without thinking, letting the tight knot of emotion in his chest move him, Bruce threw a punch at Superman.

It was a slow punch, even with the suit; a sparring punch. Superman shifted a few inches to the left to avoid it and returned the blow, his face nothing more than thoughtful. Bruce dodged it easily and kicked at Superman, who stepped aside.

They mirrored each other, a bright and dark reflection, touching nothing but air, always able to evade each other. They could keep this up forever, Bruce thought, and emotion twisted in him again, a snarl of feelings that tore and shredded.

When Superman threw another punch, Bruce didn’t dodge it, let it connect squarely with his chest.

The impact shuddered through him like a sob, and he lashed out with his foot and caught Clark on the hip, connecting hard with the suit’s power behind him. Another blow on his shoulder, one on his ribcage--his fist met Superman’s stomach and Clark made a stifled sound deep in his throat. They were locked together now in a sharp exchange of strikes and kicks, the sound of hands and feet striking flesh loud in the desert silence. It was always this way, Bruce thought through the pain and the rush of adrenaline that felt almost like joy, they were always good enough to hurt, forever too good to break each other.

He could feel a fierce grin on his face, and he whirled to meet the next blow, craving it, and then he saw the tears on Clark’s face.

The sight knocked him out of the rhythm of the fight completely; he stumbled and Superman seized him and threw him hard on his back, stooping over him. Powerful hands clenched in the fabric of the suit at the neck. And then Clark bowed his head to rest his forehead on Bruce’s breastbone, his shoulders shaking silently. Bruce put his arms on Clark’s shoulder blades, feeling the power and pain in them, and waited, staring at the merciless blue sky.

“They all died,” Clark said hoarsely, still not looking at him. “And I thought--when I saw them dying, I thought-- _If Bruce were here, we could stop this. We always could do anything together._ But you weren’t there.” There was no reproach in his voice, only grief. “And then I heard your recording, Tim brought me your voice, telling me you knew I’d search for you. But I failed, I failed, and I wasn’t even here when you came back.”

Bruce considered telling Clark that if he hadn’t brought the Time Sphere to the future, Bruce could never have stolen it in order to get back to the present. He remembered Clark’s face at Vanishing Point, drawn with pain at the sight of him walking away, and thought better of it. “I knew you’d search for me,” he said instead. “I never said you’d be able to find me.”

There was a small huff of something like laughter. “Semantics.”

“Not exactly.” Not at all, really. It was always the seeking that mattered. Clark shook his head but didn’t move out of Bruce’s--embrace? Was it an embrace? Semantics again. The labels were never important between them.

“So I guess,” Clark said, sounding uncertain for the first time, “I guess I decided I would let you search for me this time.”

“Clark.” He couldn’t keep the laughter out of his voice now. “Clark. Finding a man dressed in red and blue spandex in a salt plain desert is not a worthy challenge for the World’s Greatest Detective.”

Clark raised his head then. He was smiling, but there were tear tracks on his face that he made no effort to wipe away. “And you found me.”

“And I...I found you,” Bruce said, and his voice shook. After a moment he gave up trying to resist the impulse, and reached up to smooth away the traces of tears on Clark’s face. Clark closed his eyes and leaned into the touch, and the heat of the desert was suddenly nothing compared to what was igniting down Bruce’s spine, in his chest. “I found you.”

“What now?” whispered Clark.

“Well,” Bruce said, “I was thinking of traveling the world a little while. Japan, Argentina, England. I’ll be meeting up with Tim and Selina. If you wanted to, you could...join me.”

“I want to,” Clark said. “Yes. I think I’d like that.” He stood up and offered his hand to Bruce, who took it. “Kara broke your suit’s nifty little boosters,” he said. He looked west toward the sunset and the rising mountains. “You’re probably in a hurry to get back. I should give you a lift out of here.”

“I have a better idea,” said Bruce. “How about we walk out together?”

 **: : :**

There were two figures now, one dark and one bright, not trudging but striding together toward the mountains to the west. Kara watched them until the sun set and the stars began to come out. Long purple shadows swallowed up the two tiny figures, but Kara wasn’t worried.

They were together.


End file.
